On any given city park walk on the Front Range, it can seem like every other living creature you encounter is a golden retriever.
The shaggy love bundles are with us every step of the way — and not just for the fun parts. They’re also right next to us when we suck in air pollution, and that means when Colorado’s air is thick with wildfire smoke and ozone, our dogs are absorbing the same gunk into anatomically similar lungs.
A team of Colorado State University researchers believe it’s time to study what that means, not just for Bella and Rusty and Sarge and Lucy, but for their human companions as well. Dogs suffer many of the same health challenges their handlers do, and are easier to study over 13 years — they and their owners eagerly show up for the tests and the paperwork for an entire doggy lifespan.
“Our beloved dogs share our world, including exposure to air pollution and wildfire smoke,” said Sheryl Magzamen, a CSU professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and one of the study leaders. “Sadly, they have a shorter lifespan than we do, but that is also an opportunity to look at the effects of this exposure.”
The researchers will match a national golden retriever longitudinal health tracker, with more than 3,000 dogs entered, with a separate data set from CSU pollution monitoring of PM2.5 particulate pollution in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences. PM2.5, specks that are up to 2.5 micrometers or one-thirtieth of the thickness of human hair, is a dangerous component of wildfire smoke that drifts across the Front Range, from wildfires ranging from the foothills to the Western Slope to California and Canada.
Overlaying the data sets could show spikes in golden retriever illness after a major PM2.5 event in that area. With climate change producing more frequent large wildfires, such knowledge will be increasingly relevant for both dogs and humans, the research team predicts. And for counties like those on the Front Range also plagued by high summer ozone, wildfire smoke events often correlate with ozone alert days — more fodder for discerning health scientists.